in 1820, anything beyond pennsylvania was still "the south". nowadays NoVa barely even counts. most of florida certainly doesn't. by 2450, "the south" will be a narrow strip from savannah to shreveport. the last good barbecue recipe will be in the hands of a tiny enclave of primitive baptists, hidden in the fens of the okefenokee national wildlife refuge.
saw someone refer to not knowing how to keep track of your money as "girl math" ......why are we in this weird era of treating women like idiots but repackaging it to sound cute and quirky. We All Need To Stop
at this point i also take issue with those tweets/posts that are of the genre “girls were meant to sit in their bed with treats and do nothing all day” it was fun and #relatable maybe the first few times but it’s really just feeding into this weird mass objectification and dehumanization of women going on all over every social media platform now
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
Relevant xkcd
Ha I wonder how many strokes the most complex Chinese character has like maybe eightee-
Has a Chinese son, names him bèng-dá, and he hates me
My beloved son 䨻龘 just trying to write his name in kindergarten
No, I don't literally worship the noosphere. Although it holds the divine information noosphere is overall neutral. The great demon and distorter of truth called Trotskyism came from there and still plagues us to this day. Another two demonic presences that came through were wojaks and country balls.
first it was girls' locker rooms vs boys' locker rooms then it was the feminine urge to vs the masculine urge to now it's girl dinner vs boy dinner when will it end when will we escape i feel like maybe some of you guys dont even want to escape doesnt anyone else want to escape
i promise im going to stop posting about it soon but the most insane thing about the Banana Discourse is that like. there are already lots of fruits that are of limited availability in the USA because they're not grown there and they haven't enforced massive export economies for them at gunpoint. you'd think by the way these people talk that usamericans are rioting in the streets and committing mass suicide because they can't buy a papaya or a durian or a dragonfruit at the gas station. like there's already fruits that are comparatively scarce in the USA and everyone seems to have survived that being the case but you point out that socialist revolution would require a scale back from Total Banana Ubiquity and people legitimately act like it's white genocide
Pretty much the only time I have grapes that are to my tastes is when I fly back to Korea/Japan, and I feel like if these fucking yankees traveled like more than 50 miles from where they lived or admitted to themselves that their pov is myopic from lack of experience, they'd grow some perspective for understanding things that are as simple as, "if you're too far from where things are grown, you won't be able to eat the thing every day."
I think that one of the reasons our food system seems so disconnected from our land is that a big tool of USA colonization was to make the natives food insecure. There are plenty of photos of dead bison piled insanely high. Colonizers intentionally destroyed the food available in this land to starve out Natives and now to get food they use the military to steal it from other lands.
Also the United States has a lot of fruits that are native to the area that are basically never sold in stores. Pawpaws & persimmons grow all over where I'm from but it's only seen as a thing that weird forager people eat. I can pay for an expensive star fruit that tastes like a wet glove because I live too far away from where it grew.
Food is really fucking essential to survival, but being aware of food from our own land is too powerful of knowledge. Food sovereignty is so important. We want food sovereignty, not just food security.
Food sovereignty
Food sovereignty
Food sovereignty
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT THING TO ME!!
Do y'all have any idea how many edible plants there are that we don't eat for cultural reasons (racism and classism?)
Example #1: Amaranth
Amaranth refers to any of plants from genus Amaranthus for our purposes, some of these are domesticated to varying extents
Amaranthus species are primarily important in the USA due to being our most costly agricultural weed.
This plant has declared war on industrial monocrop agriculture. Like all the best weeds, it is ridiculously adaptable. Its resistance to herbicides like Roundup keeps getting stronger and more expansive. In 2022, Amaranthus palmeri was found with SIMULTANEOUS resistance to SIX herbicide modes of action (six separate families of herbicide!)
So remember Roundup Ready corn? Yeah, that shit is basically obsolete in many places because every weed under the sun has evolved glyphosate resistance. So Monsanto spent ten years developing crop varieties resistant to Dicamba as well so crops could be sprayed with Dicamba to control weeds, and within 5 years, Dicamba-resistant weeds were proliferating.
I could go on forever about how european agriculture ran roughshod over the north american continent fucking up things you wouldn't think COULD be fucked up through pure malicious ignorance, but rest assured the era of chemical-dependent agriculture is in its decline because weeds can evolve faster than we can develop new technologies.
Guess what, though? Amaranth was a CROP for Native Americans and still is, domesticated varieties are popular in Mexico, and it's high in protein, gluten free, and a dual purpose crop where you can harvest the leaves as vegetables 2-3 times a year without impacting the eventual seed harvest.
Researchers are already investigating it for its utility as a crop in areas that will be heavily impacted by climate change.
North America USED to be flourishing with food sources cultivated carefully by Native Americans for the benefit of the whole ecosystem, we had abundance of oaks (boil out the tannins and acorns are edible!) hickory nuts, pecans and American chestnuts, but Europeans stopped doing controlled burns and chopped down virtually all forest in the East, and now they're dominated by more fire intolerant species rather than the nut-producing species...and of course the American chestnuts fell victim to introduced chestnut blight.
Canebrakes! Ough! Did y'all know we have native BAMBOO?? The Southeast used to be covered in immense swaths of bamboo forest, and it was almost entirely obliterated (extincting the Carolina parakeet and helping with extinction of passenger pigeons in the process). Genus Arundinaria, you can look it up. American bamboo shoots can be used culinarily just as bamboo is eaten in Asian regions where bamboo grows.
Arundinaria bamboos have been called "the plastic of the Southeastern Native Americans" because they used (and still use) it for EVERYTHING. Bedframes, baskets (WATERPROOF!), backpacks, containers, fish traps, blowguns, flutes, you name it. Unlike some introduced Asian bamboos you may know, it grows very straight and has no groove (sulcus) in between the nodes, meaning it's hard and doesn't deform at all as it grows.
If you cook milkweed, it's edible! In ethnobotanical databases it's referenced a TON as a vegetable. The flowers can be used to turn lemonade pink. Virginia springbeauty has tiny potato-like tubers that can be eaten the same way as potatoes.
Did y'all know we have wild grapes? They're referenced in To Kill a Mockingbird, they're called scuppernongs. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries...all native to the USA. We have passion fruit (Passiflora incarnata), we have mulberries (Morus rubra), we have native wild plums and cherries, and PAWPAWS.
I got to eat wild pawpaws last year. I got a whiff of something unbelievably sweet and banana-y in the woods and climbed down the hillside to find the source, and spent like half an hour messily devouring ripe pawpaws in a pawpaw grove. It was literally the most incredible fruit experience I've ever had. They are like a perfect blend between a mango and a banana, with a velvety, creamy, soft texture that is way better than either. You can show me a picture of a pawpaw and I'll start salivating.
These trees grow wild all over the place in rural areas. Why don't we sell pawpaws in stores then? Capitalism. Pawpaws are way softer and more fragile than bananas and spoil really quickly after ripening, so they can't be shipped long distances, and thus they're almost forgotten because a fruit that can only be obtained from small local growers is useless to Walmart.
So many of these plants grow eagerly in disturbed environments. Wild strawberries love gravelly, rocky areas. Sunflowers were actually considered noxious weeds a hundred years ago. Why aren't we aware of them? Mowing, weed-whacking and bulldozing has extirpated food plants to be replaced with useless, invasive grass.
"Oof ouch we have to figure out how to feed the planet aaaaaa there's too many people on Earth to grow enough food" Over thousands of square miles we literally obliterated dozens of edible food plants and replaced them with invasive lawn grass
Stage 1: using your native language's idioms in English out of habit/lack of knowledge
Stage 2: using English idioms as much as you can to prove that you're good at English
Stage 3: using your native language's idioms in English because they fuck actually
“either take off your cross or put on your underwear” (ukrainian) to say that you can’t have both things at once is my favorite expression to ever exist in any language. i needed to put this out into the world so bad, im finally free.
I'm gonna write some:
"you can't put doors to the countryside" referring to something you cannot control
"to honour which saint?🤨" A response to someone doing such a bizarre thing that you can only assume it's for a very specific god ritual (what my mom says when I'm caught cooking a full meal at 3am)
"my mouth is dryer than Christ's sandals" or nsfw version "dryer than a doll's underwear"
"never say from this water I shan't drink" like never say never.
"to write the dots on the i's" to make a negotiation very clear, point out flaws.
"you have to feed him separately" as in 'this person is a handful'
"it's like throwing daisies to the pigs" wasteful, or useless, unappreciated act
"no one gave you a candle in this burial" you don't have permission to talk/give your opinion
"it's like going to pee and not letting even a drop" pointless, absurd, waste of time
"when the devil is bored he kills flies with his tail" when someone you hate is suspiciously idle and seems innocent (and you KNOW!!! they'll do something)
"my saint went back to the sky" meaning you were so distracted/zoned out that you didn't even notice a saint had descended to help you until it left lmao
"I'm more tied up than a Roman's leg" (refering to Roman knee high sandals) it means you're very busy
"humans are naturally selfish and evil" factoid actually just statistical error. former united states president ronald w. reagan,
Reminder that Garand Thumb stopped pretending he and his guntuber clique aren't straight up white supremacists. Even if you don't care about guns, you really fucking need to pay attention to this, because he is incredibly influential. He is by far the most popular guntuber, maybe the most popular ever. Teenage boys love him, and he's the foot in the door to radicalize kids. He's been doing more and more clickbait content to spread his influence as far as he can. This is fascist indoctrination, and it's incredibly effective.
White supremacy really is just a catch-all isn't it? Their whole platform is work out, train, be dangerous, love your family, fuck the government.
Recognizing patterns isn't racist. Recognizing crime statistics and per capita isn't racist. Recognizing that the safest places in the states and around the world have a handful of things in common isn't racist.
Do you ever wonder why these guys gather such a following? You tell a group of people that they're the problem for most of their lives, before they even have the capacity to do any of that anyway in some cases, and you act surprised when they flock to people that appeal to them and encourage them to not be a proverbial punching bag. The left is dumbfounded at a rise in "fascism" as if it's not their fault it happens in the first place.
This is exactly the type of shit that pushed me to where I am now. This “believe everything we say without question or you’re a racist/nazi/white supremacist”.
as i write my silly little family abolition post i keep thinking of the segment in wage labour & capital where marx argues that capitalism as a system of production serves to enforce both production and non-production--i.e., when a factory is not profitable, even though it might produce something necessary, even if people might be willing to work there, they are actively prevented by private property--private property enforces the disuse of land, machinery, etc just as much as it regulates its use. and i think considering the family in those terms is really useful--because you can break away from just understanding the family as providing care (and therefore obviously a good thing, how could we abolish the family!) but also conversely as one of foreclosing care--if nobody will care for the child, or the senior, or the sick, or disabled, within the confines of the family, then the boundaries of the family serve to prevent anyone else from providing that care. much like industry is not a 'provider' of work, but a regimenter of it, so is the family best understood as a regimenter of care.
Thinking about the Library of Alexandria.
Or at least the *myth* of the Library of Alexandria. You know, the greatest Library in the world, a monument of learning and reading and culture, cataclysmically destroyed in one terrible fire, knowledge lost forever, etc etc. It feels like this great tragedy of history, this terrible loss to humanity.
And it's not...true.
We actually have a lot of sources that show that the library had been in decline for a few centuries before then. Between some scholars getting exiled, a general diaspora of the scholars who remained, lack of funding, and diminishing prestige, it seems that the library's collection and scholarship was already greatly diminished, moved elsewhere.
It's true that Caesars troops did set fire to some ships in the harbor in 48BCE, and that fire did spread through the city. The Library was likely damaged, and some of its materials likely destroyed... but not completely. And it was repaired or rebuilt not long after. (One source even hints that it wasn't the library proper, but some warehouses owned by the library near the docks that burned.)
And the Library continued to exist for at least a few more centuries. Never at the same scale and prestige as it has at its height, but still there as a resource to scholars until at least the 270s CE.
But that's less exciting I guess. Less tragic, maybe. Less dramatic. That instead of it being a terrible accident, an act of the Gods, a perfect symbol at how the folly of war can tumble great monuments- Instead its just...about how underfunded Institutions and lack of support from the government towards academics will rot these great institutions slowly but surely.
And I wonder what it says about us that we find one of those stories more emotionally compelling and evocative than the other.
r/lawncare is an excellent demonstration of the premise underlying diet and beauty scams. Namely that if you advertise enough Products intended to do a thing—however impossible and unrealistic the thing—no force under heaven will be powerful enough to turn people away from the foolish notion that they can accomplish it.
The Products become an Industry, and the existence of the Industry becomes irrefutable evidence that the ideal is a real thing you can do.
There are many, many posts on r/lawncare that are vaguely the same: photos showing a neat lawn with a rather thin, faded appearance, with green sparsely overlying undertones of brown thatch and dust. "What's wrong with my lawn? It looked so nice a few months ago?"
It's working as intended, my friend. You got rid of all the weeds, cut the monoculture of grass 2 inches short, and nuked the environment of insect life, and now the soil is compacted, there's no nitrogen fixers, no mycorrhizal network, no tunneling, digging or decomposing being done by bugs, no earthworms, and no broad leaf vegetation, so the grass is slowly starving and suffocating to death.
No such thing as a healthy monoculture.
i love reading classics scholarship from the early 20th century and having it inevitably start off with something insane like this
I fucking hate on boarding. I'm sitting here like a twit, all my co workers working hard, and I'm condemned to little guy waiting to get learned.
Nothing grants me reprieve against the ever encroaching guilt, each little snack bar a cacophony tribute to my inaction, the humming of the AC outweighs my contribution.
The co workers are super nice though 😃
My brother in christ you chose the office job.
Dj crazytimes is exposing SO MANY charlatans who don't know the difference between eurobeat and eurodance
Preemptively pulling rank on anyone brave enough to put two to three paragraphs on MY post
Afaik eurobeat is video game music and eurodance is eurovision song festival music?
You're right about one thing
Whatever they are you better hope they're working